I logged into GTalk on my iPhone recently looking for a friend and noticed a new Buzz link. Curious, I tapped on it and it told me “Safari Would Like to Use Your Current Location”. Anything that wants to automatically use my GPS location when I don’t expect it to creeps me out, so I declined. (And even though I declined, every so often it kept annoying me about wishing to use my location again and again presumably because I still had the site open.)

I just spent time at work reviewing and evaluating policies regarding the ethics and expectations of sharing contact information. In business (and I’ve also seen this bleed into personal lives), it’s always good etiquette to check with contacts before connecting them to each other and to ask for permission before sharing contact information. Coincidentally, thanks to GBuzz, this etiquette and respect for privacy is easily thrown out the door and GBuzz helps you sell out your friends anyway; it discloses who you email most often and who emails you frequently by default.

Check out more details in Google Buzz: Privacy Nightmare.

So… my dear frequent email pals, I’m not selling you out; I turned off that feature. The setting actually isn’t easy to find. If you haven’t gone through the GBuzz steps and you go to Edit Profile (as mentioned in the article above), it’s not there:

I also found a page indicating that my profile was not public which could be misleading to some. I was able to find the option for “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me” referred to in the article under the “view connected sites” link though it uses the term show instead of display. You can also get there by clicking on “# connected sites” next to your name.

When you click on the Next Step button:

It’s easy for someone to miss the tiny little note about showing people you follow and people who follow you in your profile and companies use this default and opt-out strategy to increase/encourage adoption by assuming that people don’t care enough to read carefully or pay attention. But seriously, who would easily think the lists automatically refer to the people you email frequently and vice versa? (I have 0 followers and I’m following 0 because I took the screenshot from an account I barely use.) Someone has already complained that she’s on an ex-boyfriend’s follow list and businesses/journalists/freelancers who use gmail could easily accidentally expose their business contacts and sources. If you click on the Edit link:

That’s where you find the option to change that setting. The good news is that if you weren’t paying attention the first time and just clicking quickly, your Edit Profile page finally has that setting added to it once you’ve gone through the GBuzz setup steps (use the direct link or navigate to it by logging into GMail or your Google Account, going to google.com, click on “Settings”, then “Google Account Settings”, finally “Edit Profile”):

If I remember correctly, I already had a profile and I still hadn’t seen the option to change the privacy setting via Edit Profile. Some speculate that if someone has a Google profile and hasn’t set up GBuzz yet, it may be possible to view their follow lists.

When Google rolled out Google Wave and I gave it a spin, I thought Google’s strategy wasn’t the right approach because it made it difficult for people to use with others in the collaborative way that GWave was intended to be used although in GWave, it does suggest contacts for you, but now Google has done the complete opposite with GBuzz in allowing everyone to use it and publicly sharing the suggested contacts. Something in between would have been better.

Note: The screenshots look slightly different from each other because I snapped some of them from another account for which GBuzz was not yet activated.